Asynchronism
by M-Maltesers
Summary: Yuuta and Syuusuke and their relationship; it's a juggling act.


Note: The first of a few fics I'm uploading here. They're old; published on one of my LJs, but I re-read them, fell in love with them again and wanted to share them here.

**Asynchronism**

by Miki

"I'm bored," Yuuta complained.

"Don't say that, it might be contagious," Shuusuke chuckled, tossing a pillow in his brother's direction. Yuuta caught it and tossed it back quickly with a lazy curl of his arm and flick of his wrist.

"No, really," he insisted. "I've already been through all those at least twice," he pointed to the cardboard shoebox (Yumiko's shoes, stilettos by Escada, size 37, last season) where he kept the games for his Nintendo. "I'm not playing them again," he moaned, snatching up another pillow and squashing it to his chest with his arms.

"I've watched all those," he said, waving his arm at their rather minimalistic movie collection, and then at the kitchen, "And where's all the food? I thought Nee-san was going to make pie yesterday and then she didn't."

Shuusuke turned his magazine page over, finding himself at an article about pirating in the Malacca Strait. "Why don't we play a game?" he smiled.

"What?" Yuuta responded, brusque.

"Dress-ups," Shuusuke kept smiling. "You still have that pirate costume from Saeki's birthday last year, don't you?"

"We're _not _playing dress-ups," Yuuta scolded snappishly. "I told you before; I hate it when you remind me of that."

"Remind you of what?" Shuusuke teased. "Playing dress-ups or of Saeki's party?"

Yuuta tensed and crossed his arms over his chest, trying to allay the nervousness flooding through him. Mentions of Saeki brought back memories of his childhood; mentions of his last birthday party only brought back embarrassment.

He had long since decided that he would 1: Never drink again, and 2: Never play games with his brother in public again. And should he somehow fail to stick to those two rules, number 3 was: Never let Saeki within ten metres of him should he happen to be armed with three metres of rope and a camera.

"You suck," he muttered to his brother. "You shouldn't have played along with him. That was mean," he complained, his cheeks reddening with the memory of the humiliation he'd felt. They'd tied him up to a kitchen chair after he'd lost a dare to his brother, and not only that; he'd lost one item of clothing after another as Saeki forced them to play strip poker while Yuuta only had one hand free.

"I didn't play along with him," Shuusuke tilted his head, looking at Yuuta with gentleness although his voice never stopped teasing. "It was my idea, didn't you know?"

Yuuta closed his eyes. "Stupid aniki," he muttered. "You should know I hate it when you're like that."

Shuusuke's heart always skipped a beat whenever he heard that word, his heart quickening its beat afterwards as though racing along to make up for it. It was painful to think that Yuuta had once followed him around and that Shuusuke had once been the centre of his world; the person he loved the most and who he told it to at the drop of a hat, or on command, even.

He hadn't meant things to spiral out of control that evening. He had meant the game in jest at first, and then for selfish reasons of his own. By then, the party had already wound down and there were only seven of them left at Saeki's including the host himself, and Rokkaku's Bane-san, Davide, Itsuki and a girl whose name Shuusuke still couldn't remember. Yuuta had talked to her soon after they'd arrived, and to see her gravitating towards him, moving closer and closer towards the end of the evening, and even going so far as to ask him for his phone number had reminded Shuusuke that his little brother was growing up.

And he was still growing away.

"I'm going to find something to do," Yuuta informed him as he got to his feet and pulled his pants up and his shirt down. "I can't believe this house is so boring," he muttered as he walked off. "It didn't used to be like this. I don't know how you live here."

Shuusuke shut his magazine, bored with the farce that his day had become. He hadn't read a word of it properly and he was up to page 108.

Yuuta was right that things hadn't always been this way, but it was all too easy to say something simple like that when they both knew that behind his words were a hundred reasons why things had changed, and there was no way they could ever be changed back.

(S)

Shuusuke trod on one of Yuuta's shoes when he walked into his room.

"Yuuta? You shouldn't leave things lying around… Yuuta?" he flinched, realising he was on the receiving end of a glare already.

Yuuta looked away quickly enough, but Shuusuke had known him all his life and the tell-tale blush across his cheeks seemed to suggest something was bothering him, other than his big brother stepping on his stuff.

He was on his knees next to his bed, but he shoved a box back under there and stood up quickly. "There's nothing to do in here. I forgot I took so much stuff to school with me."

Shuusuke flinched. The mention of Saint Rudolph didn't rest easy with him. He had noticed the slow disappearances of his younger brother's possessions from the room, although it hadn't done much to diminish the Yuuta-ish feel Shuusuke always got when he walked into it.

Yuuta was messy, fussy, sulky and dishonest with his own emotions a lot of the time, although when he was straight-up with his brother, those were the moments that hurt the most because they were the ones that Shuusuke knew would never have happened at all if things hadn't turned out this way. If he hadn't been so good at tennis. If Yuuta hadn't followed him into it. If he hadn't wanted so desperately to be better than his brother. If he hadn't gone to Seishun Gakuen and if he hadn't felt so taunted by the whispers around him.

Shuusuke had been fascinated the first time he'd picked up a tennis racquet, but Yuuta had been fascinated more by his brother, and he'd followed him around like a duck followed its mother; blindly, lovingly, happily, trustingly.

"So what did you find under there?" Shuusuke asked quickly. His throat felt tight around the words but he forced them through. Thinking of the past did nothing for the present.

"Nothing," Yuuta answered and put his hands behind his back, dropping down to sit on the side of his bed. "I told you; there's nothing in here."

Shuusuke tilted his head and allowed a smile to grace his lips. "If there's nothing in here, then why do you look so guilty?" he teased. "Come on, Yuuta. You look as though you've just been caught jerking off in the middle of the day," he laughed.

Yuuta's face filled with colour faster than Shuusuke could blink. "Don't say that, stupid!" he snapped. "D-Don't think about things like that. That's gross."

Shuusuke smiled. "So why are you looking so guilty then?"

"And since when do you talk like that anyway?" Yuuta continued stubbornly, ignoring his brother's question with all the subtlety of a thirteen year old who knows his privacy is about to be invaded. "That's not… That's not like you," he frowned.

Shuusuke smiled. Indeed, it wasn't his wording and it wasn't the way he'd have wanted to start off a conversation. Starting like that just put his brother on the defensive and ended things before they'd even begun properly. But seeing Yuuta had reminded him of Saeki, and for a second he'd thought it would be good if he could only have Saeki's coolness around his brother. Maybe Saeki wasn't Yuuta's favourite person right now, but Yuuta had always liked him. Saeki had a way of doing that to people even though he was a little rough at times with his speech, crude sometimes with his words.

Like Yuuta, Shuusuke chose to ignore his brother's comment, continuing on his own train of enquiry. There had to be something under the bed, judging from Yuuta's jumpy behaviour. Porn seemed both the most likely and unlikely answer, so Shuusuke invited himself into the room further and stooped down to his knees, peering under the bed frame before Yuuta could think of an excuse to tell him to go away.

"Hmm…" He looked at the messy stacks of magazines (Yuuta still kept his subscriptions sent to his home address rather than to school. That was just asking for stupid people to hijack them, steal them, borrow them permanently or ruin them before he could read them) and noticed something further towards the wall than the others.

"Aniki," Yuuta's voice warned, above him.

Shuusuke laughed, sticking his head under and stretching out his arm. "What? You're not hiding anything under here, so what's the harm in looking? You don't mind if I look, do you Yuuta?"

"I do," Yuuta said loudly, only making Shuusuke laugh under his breath some more. The dust made his eyes and nose sting, so he snatched the object up with his fingers and pulled it out.

The thick layer of dust pushed off with the palm of his hand, Shuusuke stared at the object, a DVD not a magazine. His breath hitched in his throat. "Oh, I didn't know you liked big breasts," he managed to tease.

He felt sick.

Yuuta's change of expression was instantaneous. "Aniki!" he cried out, and reached down to snatch the disc back from his brother's hand.

"So where'd you get it from?" Shuusuke asked. He was aware his own voice sounded hardened, as though he were interrogating Yuuta and actually had the right to.

He didn't have any right to. He was only twelve months older than his brother; neither of them adults, and Yuuta had stopped paying attention to Shuusuke's brotherly advice a long time ago.

"T's not mine," Yuuta scowled, shoving it right back down the side of his bed again. "I was supposed to give it back. It's not mine," he repeated, glaring at his brother.

Shuusuke blinked, surprised by the lapse in anger he felt. Hearing Yuuta say it wasn't his was a relief, at least. Small wonder though this conversation hadn't happened before, given that he was living in a boy's dormitory and boys were always more badly behaved without any parents around to find these things and cut their allowances.

"Was it one of your team mates?" he asked.

Yuuta swallowed apprehensively. "So what if it was?"

He was too easy to read.

Shuusuke tucked his hands behind his thighs, sitting down on them on the edge of the bed. He sat a good thirty centimetres from his brother (a whole ruler length), ever wary of invading his personal space bubble, which lately seemed to be ever expanding every time he came home for the weekend.

"So why didn't you refuse it straight away?" he questioned. "Or were you the one who asked for it?"

Yuuta's nostrils flared and he narrowed his eyes at his brother. "Is that what you think, Aniki?"

"Either way, you've brought it home, apparently not just recently either. What did you do? Watch it and decide you liked it so much you wouldn't give it back? Or was it a present from a senpai who thought he'd teach you a few new tricks? Thought he'd teach you-"

Yuuta pushed his hands out, palms thudding into Shuusuke's shoulders and knocking him back. "It _was _a senpai's," he growled. "You're right. You're right about it, just like you always think you are," he huffed. "And I was going to give it back but I lost it. There, _happy_?"

Shuusuke sat up and crawled to the wall, reaching his arm down.

He fumbled, bringing the disc back up with a little painful last stretch of his arm, and opened it quickly. He popped the disc out and held it for a second in front of Yuuta's eyes.

Then he raised his other hand, grasped the opposite side of the disc and pressed his thumbs forwards near the centre.

The snap was nowhere near satisfying enough for Shuusuke.

Yuuta let out a choked sound, words strangled in his throat as he stared. His senpai's disc was snapped in two pieces in his brother's hands and no amount of sticky tape was going to fix it.

"_Aniki_!" he growled, launching at his brother and pushing him flat once again, knocking his head on the wall when he shoved him. The thud scared Yuuta for just a fraction of a second as he saw pain flicker across his brother's face, but then it was gone again.

Yuuta gripped at his brother's upper arms with his hands. "I was supposed to give that back, you idiot!" he yelled. "How can I give it back now?"

Shuusuke stared up at Yuuta, seeing the fear and anger written all over it. "Tell him to find something better to jerk off to," he answered, "Or better yet, maybe you can do it _for _him."

Yuuta's grip slackened on his arms.

He pulled his fist back and for a split second, Shuusuke actually believed he'd punch him. For a moment he truly believed he deserved it, because all he felt was bitter jealousy and hatred for all those people closest to Yuuta who had taken parts of his little brother away from him. For all those times he asked Yuuta out, only to be turned down in favour of someone else, and for those times when he knew Yuuta was hurting, but the person he ran to was no longer his brother.

He was being childish and petty, and he couldn't even pick the spot where his moral objections stopped and his personal ones started.

But just as the thought occurred in his mind, it was gone again.

Yuuta might have thought about hitting him, just as he'd thought about a lot of things he'd never done, but he wasn't a person who resorted to violence so easily and after a minute, he lowered his fist to his side.

"I can't believe you," he whispered, angry harsh words spoken as though he almost didn't want to say them. "Can't you see why I _hate_ _being _with you?" he yelled.

Shuusuke felt his body going limp, adrenalin rushing from his veins and leaving him a boneless body sinking into the feather-filled quilt.

"I've never hated being with you," he said back. "_Never_," he repeated.

He lifted his arm. Yuuta's hand moved with it and Shuusuke used his other to force Yuuta to sit up straight; his legs splayed under him. Then he pulled Yuuta's left wrist towards him and kissed it.

His lips lingered long enough that Yuuta jerked his arm away. But his expression had gone from angry to upset, and Shuusuke knew that was more than enough. He'd hurt his brother, again, and now he was only hurting himself.

(S)

The rubbish bin was as good a spot as any to put his senpai's disc.

Yuuta figured his mother wouldn't spot it in there, but as he stared down at the bin, he decided it was too obvious just like that, so he plucked out the disc, put the snapped halves upside down into the bin, pulled out the insert of the case and ripped that up and put it on top and then pulled out his notebook, ripping out as many half-used and useless pages as possible, screwing up the paper and dropping it on top.

Satisfied with the fact that it had the appearance of a normal rubbish bin, (who could be suspicious? It just looked like he'd been studying really hard or something) he concentrated on pulling out his school books from his bag. He had maths homework but he _always_ had maths homework. Doing it now was just stupid when he could leave it until last. Even if he didn't finish it before Sunday night, it was easy enough to drop by one of his classmate's rooms before dinner and copy the answers.

English? Geography? History?

He couldn't be bothered with any of them, he realised. He was annoyed at his brother and he knew the next time his senpai asked him about that disc, he'd have to tell the truth about it. He wasn't going to buy a new one to replace it, at any rate.

He glared out his window.

Those things were expensive – 10,000 yen or 12,000 yen sometimes. He only had half of that in his account and there was no way he was blowing a month's allowance on replacing something _he _didn't even break. And then what was his senpai even going to say? He'd probably think Yuuta was lying and just wanted to keep the stupid thing for himself!

Yuuta groaned and rubbed the back of his head roughly. The truth was that he'd tried watching it. It was ten times easier to try at home than at school, so he'd brought it home a few months before and when everyone was out of the house, he'd put it on. But it _was _gross, just like he'd heard, and the visuals weren't even the worst part of it!

He'd taken a box of tissues to the TV with him, just like his senpai had said, but in the end, all he'd done with them was to rip tissues into little shreds and leave them on the floor, pissed off that his senpai had talked up something that was so crap. What sort of person would get turned on watching other people do that?

He figured his brother hadn't ever watched it, otherwise he wouldn't have acted so stupidly about it. But he realised that Shuusuke wasn't just reacting to the disc he'd found.

He hadn't been scolding Yuuta over having it… Well, technically he was, sort of, in a way, but Yuuta didn't think that was what had pissed him off the most.

A lot of things pissed his brother off about Saint Rudolph, but mostly, Yuuta thought his brother hated it when he talked about other people there.

Calmed down enough to think things over logically, Yuuta sat down on the floor and did just that.

(S)

Shuusuke's door opened silently and Yuuta left his hand on the handle as he spoke. "How's your head?" he asked gruffly.

"Fine," Shuusuke answered, not turning around from his desk. "It didn't hurt before."

Yuuta nodded and took another step into the room to let go of the handle. He stood on the spot and eyed his brother's bed; so often his place of refuge in the past and now almost the last place he ever thought of as being welcoming. Once somewhere he'd happily roll around on (and sometimes fall off by accident), it now looked too small to roll on at all, its bedspread still the same one his brother had had since he was five.

"Can I come in?" he asked.

"You already are in," Shuusuke said. Yuuta saw his shoulders tense from behind and he considered walking back out of the room.

"Why are you in here, Yuuta? Aren't you mad at me?" Shuusuke asked, although he wasn't sure that was the case. What Yuuta felt probably wasn't anger; it was hurt and confusion, and perhaps frustration. He probably couldn't understand why his brother still treated him like a child. Why he didn't want to let of the Yuuta of his childhood.

Yuuta walked stiffly to the bed and sat, almost throwing himself down onto it. "Yeah, well," he grunted.

Shuusuke still refused to look at him. His magazine was again open in front of him but Yuuta could see it was one of the pages he'd already read.

"Well," Yuuta said louder. "I'm here for the weekend."

Shuusuke turned his head to look at him, almost afraid to see the expression on his face. "What should I do about that?"

Yuuta swallowed, rocking forwards, hunching his back as though to make himself smaller. He wasn't apologising – he didn't have anything to apologise for – and he wasn't being _nice_ either until his brother bothered looking sorry that he'd just ruined Yuuta's life for the next week. Or two. Depending on how charitable his senpai was feeling.

He just figured it was stupid to argue when all it did was make him feel guilty afterwards. "Well, I thought we were going to do something. Together."

He glared at Shuusuke. "Weren't we?" he demanded. "I haven't played a game with you since two months ago. We could still go to the courts today."

Shuusuke tilted his head. "But didn't you say before that you hated being with me?"

"So?" Yuuta retorted. "That's because you were being an arsehole."

Shuusuke chuckled, finally relaxing a little. He turned around more in his chair, hooking his arm over the back and crossing his legs as he faced Yuuta. "But I can be an arsehole on the tennis court too."

Yuuta stood up. "Well you won't be," he said surely. "And you're not. You're only an arsehole when you're being childish."

Shuusuke opened his eyes, wondering how much of him Yuuta had seen through. Yuuta met his gaze with his usual stubbornness, the hurt gone from his face even though Shuusuke knew it lingered.

"I wish I could be a child again," Shuusuke smiled, distractedly.

"Stupid," Yuuta retorted. "Why would you want to be a kid again? There's nothing good about being a kid."

Shuusuke smiled. "Isn't there? I always thought the best part of being a kid was being a kid with you."

Yuuta sat back, the colour rising in his cheeks again. Then because he couldn't think of anything to say back to his brother, he stomped to the doorway, making sure to huff enough that Shuusuke knew he was mad. He wasn't into all of his brother's sentimental crap, and he knew his brother did it just to embarrass him. He'd _always _done that, laughing at him and telling him he was cute when he was mad.

Yuuta stopped in the doorway once he felt he was far away enough from his brother, and pointed a finger as he issued his warning. "I'm going to kick your butt today, Aniki. So hurry up and get ready before I get bored."


End file.
